Abstract
Core body temperature (CBT) is an important and commonly used indicator of human health and endurance performance. A rise in baseline CBT can be attributed to an onset of flu, infection or even thermoregulatory failure when it becomes excessive. Sites which have been used for measurement of CBT include the pulmonary artery, the esophagus, the rectum and the tympanic membrane. Among them, the tympanic membrane is an attractive measurement site for CBT due to its unobtrusive nature and ease of measurement facilitated, especially when continuous CBT measurements are needed for monitoring such as during military, occupational and sporting settings. However, to-date, there are still polarizing views on the suitability of tympanic membrane as a CBT site. This paper will revisit a number of key unresolved issues in the literature and also presents, for the first time, a benchmark of the middle ear temperature against temperature measurements from other sites. Results from experiments carried out on human and primate subjects will be presented to draw a fresh set of insights against the backdrop of hypotheses and controversies.
Highlights
Core body temperature (CBT) is an important and commonly used indicator of the human health and endurance performance
An interesting observation from the results is that Point B registered a lower temperature than point in front of the malleus bone (Point A), and Point B is within the lower anterior quadrant of the tympanic membrane suggested by Brinnel and Cabanac [21] to capture a temperature measurement
This is intuitive since Point A is at the part of the tympanic membrane which is thicker compared to the lower anterior quadrant and that may translate into a higher thermal resistance against ambient disturbances, as the Finite Element Analysis (FEA) showed
Summary
Core body temperature (CBT) is an important and commonly used indicator of the human health and endurance performance. The characteristics of CBT and the ideal measurement site have attracted extensive research in both clinical and the physiological domains. The CBT of a healthy human body rarely differs and it is very close to the temperature of blood flowing in the pulmonary artery [3, 4]. The blood temperature of the pulmonary artery (Tpa) is often taken as the gold standard in CBT measurement [3,4,5,6]. The measurement of Tpa is an invasive and high risk procedure, requiring the insertion of a pulmonary artery catheter.
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